STUPID AND VIOLENT

Let's take a squint at Dylann Roof, the presumed Charleston church shooter.

I read the document thought to be his "manifesto," something he whipped together in great haste: full of typos and ellipses. Perhaps he thought he wouldn't survive his adventure in racial action.

(Maybe now he'll have time to correct and clarify.)

He says he was changed by the Trayvon Martin case. He noted the firestorm of media coverage and wondered what the big deal was. George Zimmerman was obviously "in the right."

(And I think it's true. Zimmerman was a self-righteous goofball channeling both Paul Blart and Jack Reacher, acting out of his depth. He put himself in a position he could only get out of by shooting Martin. But since everything he did was close enough to legal, he could not properly be convicted of premeditated murder. Now we must wonder if he's learned anything from his experience.)

Anyway, the whole case got Roof thinking. He did some Internet research and found a great deal of evidence that black people are stupid and violent.

Duh.

Of course they're stupid and violent. They're human beings. We invented stupid and violent.

What is Roof himself, if not stupid and violent?

It's said he almost called off his attack because the black people were so kind to him in that church. Unfortunately, his sketchy research kept him on track.

(He should never have gone into a church. Religious people are supposed to be kinder and nicer than non-religious people and must act accordingly—whether they want to or not.)

Roof makes some interesting points in his manifesto. He says black people are raised to be more racially aware than whites. That would appear to be true.

Black kids (even President Obama's kids) have to experience the "conversation," wherein they are instructed how to behave around white cops—lest they be shot or beaten or arrested for no reason. White kids are not subjected to the conversation.

(Unless you count being warned to be careful around black folks, who—it is alleged—all carry straight razors.)

"Negroes have lower Iqs, lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behavior." [sic]

I've never done a study of it, but I'm willing to believe the three traits mentioned are more prevalent in the prison population than out. For blacks and whites.

Whether these traits show up more often in the black population than among whites, I have no idea. It's tempting to use this measure to explain the disproportionate number of blacks in American prisons, but there are a lot of other factors likely to weigh in, possibly to dominate the equation.

Roof is probably right when he suggests any attempt at a scientific study of the differences between blacks and whites would likely get the researcher fired. And that's a shame. If differences exist but are kept hidden, they can never be addressed, possibly to the detriment of us all.

Roof champions segregation not only because it keeps white folks away from all those black monsters out there but because it keeps white folks from descending to the sub-human level of the blacks, culturally.

He's also concerned about schools in "bad" (i.e., black) neighborhoods where whites might be forced to attend. Schools designed to deal with lower IQs, lower impulse control, and higher levels of testosterone would presumably have less time left over to teach stuff.

Roof has problems with the school instruction he received, noting that when white folks do bad things (to blacks and others), it's because the perpetrators are white. When whites do good things (like invent civilization), it's never because they're white.

On the other hand, whenever a black man does something noteworthy, the fact he's black is considered a major deal.

When you come down to it, Dylann Roof's main plea is for renewed segregation. He's says it's not too late, that an American population only 30% white could "take it back completely."

What isn't clear is how killing nine black Bible students is a step on that path. Maybe he needed to do some more research.

MORE OF THE SAME

The news keeps bringing the same stories around time after time, with slight variations or additions.

Now we find out folks in Cleveland have asked a judge to weigh in on the case of the kid with the "toy" gun. The judge is a black man, as it turns out. He recommends the cops be charged, the shooter with murder.

For that charge to begin to make sense, several things have to be in place: It has to be common knowledge (and a fact) that white cops (or maybe all cops) have an innate (and possibly supernatural) sense of when a gun is real or not. This uncanny sense must operate even when the "gun" in question is a replica that literally cannot be told from its real counterpart without being handled.

And of course, having "sensed" the gun to be fake, the white cop has but a fraction of a second to come to the following conclusion: Now I can murder a black kid for no reason and get away with it!

Both these items must be true for even an un-premeditated chance of a lifetime lottery-winning moment of racial murder.

I don't buy it, but apparently a vast number of people know all of this is true. They know it's so clearly and incontrovertibly true that if they don't get their indictments they can only conclude the white justice system is stiffing them again.

Last week video surfaced of a white cop attempting to do something with an unruly crowd of mostly black teenagers that got out of hand at a pool party in McKinney, Texas.

The cop seemed to be alone out there, running around like a madman trying to bring order. Apparently fights had broken out over who was allowed into the pool area on a hot muggy day.

He's seen trying to arrest a young black girl in a bikini, attempting to force her face down to the grass. When some boys swarmed over to interfere, the cop jumped up and pulled his weapon on them.

As usual, civilians are ignorant of police procedures.

The girl seemed unwilling to assume the necessary position (on her belly with her hands behind her back). At this point, a lone cop has only two options: walk away or physically force the girl into position.

Maybe the cop should have thrown up his hands and said: "Okay, I give up. You folks go ahead and do whatever you want. I'm gonna go get me an iced tea or something."

Attempting to make the second choice (force the subject into position to be cuffed) is always problematical when there are other people around. Physically forcing someone to the ground looks aggressive and brutal. It's an action that might easily provoke others to intervene, escalating the situation.

A more recent video shows a cop wrestling with a teen runaway, attempting to put him in custody. The cop used a Taser on the fellow to subdue him. More brutality, obviously. And, in some bizarre cosmic mix-up, the kid was white.

Every time something like this happens—and is caught by the camera of the ubiquitous smart phone—viewers are going to form the same popular conclusion: Cops are out of control!

And yes, some of them are out of control. Cops who give an arrestee a "rough ride" in the paddy wagon, then ignore his pleas for medical attention. Cops who would shoot a fleeing man in the back because they don't want to break a sweat chasing him down.

But the majority of cops are not out of control. They're simply performing their jobs as they have been trained.

The problem is, a lot people misunderstand the sort of unavoidable physical confrontation that cops are forced into by folks who refuse to be arrested. You can't just say: "If the guy doesn't want to be arrested, let him go."

Sometimes the cops enter a gray area. Classic example: Rodney King. A man who didn't want to be arrested. A man who fought the police.

The cops Tased him, and when that didn't work they pounded on him with batons. They kept hitting him until he co-operated by lying flat out on his belly with his hands behind his back.

(That's not exactly how it ended, but you can see the baton-wielding cop stop hitting King and reach for his cuffs the instant King complied.)

But you could ask: Shouldn't the cops have found a way to end this thing a little earlier? Were they having too much fun beating the guy? Were they taking advantage of the rules to punish King for giving them a hard time?

On the other hand, if King had remained in the vehicle following the chase (he was the passenger), things may well have turned out differently. If he hadn't fought with the cops, the beating would likely not have occurred.

Unless, of course, the cops were a bunch of white racists just itching to lay into some hapless black guy with batons.

Unfortunately, a large number of people seem to know that was exactly what happened that night: Racist cops grabbing an opportunity to rough up the black guy.

More and more people nowadays seem to harbor such knowledge. They can't get it out of their heads. Every day a new video surfaces that proves their knowledge to be true (as if it needed proving; once it's in your head, it's golden).

The list of examples can never get smaller, only larger. People know what they know and they can't be wrong. Everything they see proves them right.

It's how we roll.

The real question is: How the hell did we manage to get this far without self-righteously murdering every one of our neighbors in just payment for their despicable crimes? This planet should long ago have been given back to the animals from whence we so unprofitably sprung.

For some reason, we've decided to prolong the torture before the inevitable kill. Maybe it just feels right.